Academic optimism of individual teachers: Confirming a new construct. Perceived self-efficacy in cognitive development and functioning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.īandura, A. Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. The paper contributes to better understanding of the nature of academic optimism and indicates what school investments educational practitioner can focus on to foster the culture of academic optimism.īandura, A.
The study further identified that the school investment in Internet connection, awards for student learning, parent education, teacher professional development and its incentives can have significant effect on academic optimism. It is school investment that has the majority of the impact on academic optimism. The results indicated that school resource, the preexisting conditions of a school, only has marginal effect on academic optimism. A hierarchical regression analysis was used to address research questions. The data were collected from a sample of 3672 teachers from 326 junior high schools in Taiwan. Therefore, this study adopted the perspective of school resources and investments to examine to what extent is academic optimism determined by school preexisting conditions, and what school investments can promote it. However, most of these identified variables are leadership or psychological constructs thus, it is often too abstract for school administrators to translate into real practice.
Previous studies have identified many school variables which can have significant effect on academic optimism.